Case Study – Business Transformation Program

Role: A small government agency initiated a business transformation program to modernise and streamline their internal and production processes, and enable a stronger project management culture amongst their teams. While a project management office had been initiated, our client needed the tools to enable visibility of project management processes, including scope, risk and milestone management across the agency. Cogent’s role was to provide project management and technical architecture expertise to enable the development of a project management system based on the Microsoft SharePoint platform. Our consultant led and mentored the agency’s development team, to deliver the new project management platform.

Business Challenge/What Client wanted: Our client was facing ever-increasing pressures for its staff to deliver an increasing number of publications, driving down turnaround times, while also maintaining the quality of their publication through on-line and web-based publication platforms. The agency needed a way to manage an increasing number of inter-dependent deadlines, while providing visibility to executives and staff about the various small publication projects being undertaken and the challenges they faced.

Project Outcomes: Cogent was able to provide an experienced architect and project manager who led the agency’s development team, including:
• Translating the requirements emanating from the business transformation initiative into ICT projects to deliver the tools required;
• Applying a principles-based architecture vision, based on using standard ‘out of the box’ tools to minimise future maintenance costs for the system;
• Developing the agency’s capability to undertake agile development, facilitating early delivery of key functionality to agency staff;
• Extensive workshops and consultation sessions with agency staff to develop requirements and drive the iterations of development;
• Planning and management of the iterations, to successively system functionality and realise the goals of the business transformation program.

Cogent’s Dependability & Quality of Work: While the overall goal of the business transformation program was focussed on improving the agency’s business processes, Cogent’s role took on a capability improvement aspect for our client’s IT development team at the same time. We were able to deliver an innovative solution that met our client’s needs, but we are particularly proud of the fact that our client now has a sustainable solution that is supported and maintained by a transformed internal team of developers.